Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture

Introduction

1  Introduction In late October 1961, the police chief of Mount Prospect, a Chicago suburb , took action against what he perceived to be a disturbing threat to his community: a paperback edition of Henry Miller’s notorious 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer. Visiting six drugstores that sold paperbacks, he succeeded in having all copies of the book pulled from the shelves.1 He could do this, the First Amendment notwithstanding, because Miller’s novel included what the law regarded as obscenity: obscenity defined, that is, in words with which U.S. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield characterized Miller’s novel, as “descriptions in minute detail of sexual acts” and the use of “filthy, offensive and degrading words and terms.”2 By then, a long series of legal precedents had established that obscenity, like libel and “fighting words,” did not merit First Amendment protection. A few weeks later, a Northwestern University professor named Franklyn Haiman, acting with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the local police for infringing on what he considered his right to read Miller’s novel. The book’s American publisher, Barney Rosset of Grove Press, described the resulting trial as “the most dramatic ” of sixty such legal cases nationwide that contested the suppression of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Edward de Grazia, a lawyer and legal historian, singles out that Chicago trial as “one of the best examples” of how lawyers and judges together transformed a few statements from a 1957 Supreme Court obscenity decision, Roth v. United States, into a 2  Introduction widely applicable First Amendment defense of so-called dirty books, a defense that had profound consequences for the representation of sex in American literature and culture.3 What goes unmentioned in accounts of this crucial trial is the prominence of Jews among the advocates for Miller’s novel. Haiman, the plaintiff who initiated the suit, was Jewish, and so was his lawyer, the veteran First Amendment advocate Elmer Gertz. The book’s publisher, Rosset, considered himself half Jewish. The paperback of Miller’s book contained an introduction by the poet Karl Shapiro, whose most recent collection of verse was titled Poems of a Jew. Gertz called as the first expert witness to testify on behalf of the novel Northwestern University literary scholar and James Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, son of Jewish immigrants from Romania and Ukraine. The presiding judge, Samuel B. Epstein—who referred to Miller’s novel as “filth” but ultimately decided the case in favor of Haiman’s “freedom to read”—was, like Ellmann, a first-generation American, whose father had trained at the famed Slobodka yeshiva in Lithuania and had come to Chicago in 1911 to lead one of the nation’s largest Orthodox Jewish communities.4 Should the Jewishness of Haiman, Gertz, Rosset, Shapiro, Ellmann, and Epstein matter to literary historians interested in the legal defense of Tropic of Cancer? Miller, a German American whose forebears were Catholics, did consider Jewishness relevant to his literary project and to the issue of American treatments of obscenity. In Tropic of Cancer, Miller’s autobiographical narrator almost prophesizes the events of the Chicago trial when he notes that “the first people to turn to when you’re down and out are the Jews.” Even more pointedly, the narrator, aware that his monologues constitute criminal obscenity under the American laws of his time, remarks that he might as well “become a Jew” himself: “Why not?” he wonders, on the book’s third page. “I already speak like a Jew.”5 * * * We cannot, of course, blithely accept the implication of Miller’s narrator ’s remark. It would be a mistake to explain the participation of Haiman, Gertz, Rosset, Shapiro, Ellmann, and Epstein in the defense of Tropic of Cancer by saying that as Jews they were predisposed to favor obscene language. That would mean endorsing a venerable, deplorable, 3  Introduction and ignorant anti-Semitic tradition that has understood Jewish speech and writing as obscene. Indeed, the concept of obscenity evolved in American legal discourse in the late 19th century as a response to fears about the speech and behavior of Jews and others suspected of being insufficiently American and Christian. The idea of Jews as differing sexually from Christians had a long history by then: in the ancient Mediterranean , Jews had been called an “obscene people,” who were “prone to lust,” and “indisputably carnal” by Romans and early Christians who repudiated...